Artists' Statement
“Common Side-Effects” takes place in a living room setting, like any living room, that could exist in any city, in any state. The family unit assumes multiple configurations and relationships, both visually and viscerally. This tenderly dysfunctional trio creates a miasma of physical and sonic theatre.
The noted cabaret artist, Mrs. Hobbs, performs on her accordion, and in her hands, it becomes a virtual fourth member of this untraditional family unit. The accompanist’s experimental tones and soundscapes create a variety of evocative aural imagery.
The physical artists, Naked With Shoes’ Anne and Jeff Grimaldo, hurl themselves against walls and into furniture in an attempt to escape and survive this volatile landscape. Habitual, ritualistic, everyday activities become sharp, regimented actions, close-order drills – sometimes propulsive, sometimes soft, always compelling.
This bipolar foursome plays with time and distorts space, creating a dreamlike and surreal private world.
Highways' Statement
"Highways unique entry into the year-long nationwide theater festival takes ten short works and transforms them into a propulsive, audience initiated landscape of performance, dance, sound, and film projection.
Come one and come all! Enter Highways’ “anti” circus, a performance installation wherein the audience journeys across a twisted sideshow that looks an awful
lot like home. Here flesh and soul are bought and sold, “queens” reign supreme, and the American melting
pot is a poisoned Kool-Aid everyone must drink. Graceful improv dance meets hysterically raging performance art, electronic noise and acid house meets accordion folk, break-dance meets capoeria, the political meets the absurd, life marries death + all the cholesterol clogging carnival sweets you can eat.
365 Days/365 Plays started in November 2002 when Suzan Lori-Parks committed to writing a play a day for the next 365 days. In Los Angeles, over the course of
this year, 51 L.A. theater groups - coordinated by the L.A. hub theater, Center Theatre Group and Diane
Rodriguez - will take part in this project. Highways presents week 48. |
